"Death of Mrs. Grundy!" Imagine opening one's newspaper some morning and
finding in sensational headlines that welcome news. One recalls the
beautiful old legend of the death of Pan, and how--false report though
it happily was--there once ran echoing through the world a long
heartbroken sigh, and a mysterious voice was heard wailing three times
from land to land, "Great Pan is dead!" Similarly, on that happy morning
I have imagined, one can imagine, too, another sigh passing from land to
land, the sigh of a vast relief, of a great thankfulness for the lifting
of an ineffable burden, as though the earth stretched its limbs and drew
great draughts of a new freedom. How wildly the birds would sing that
morning! And I believe that even the church bells would ring of
themselves!
Such definite news is not mine to proclaim, but if it cannot be
announced with certitude that Mrs. Grundy is no more, it may, at all
events, be affirmed without hesitation that she is on her deathbed, and
that surely, if slowly, she is breathing her last. Yes, that poisonous
breath, which has so long pervaded like numbing miasma the free air of
the world, will soon be out of her foolish, hypocritical old body; and
though it may still linger on here and there in provincial backwoods and
suburban fastnesses, from the great air centres of civilization it will
have passed away forever.
The origin of Mrs. Grundy is shrouded in mystery. In fact, though one
thus speaks of her as so potent a personification, she has of course
never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard
to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to
lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in
literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being
invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been
wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself
where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on
the stage. She is only referred to in frightened whispers. "_What will
Mrs. Grundy say?_" is the nervous catchword of one of the characters,
much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp was wont to defer to the censorious
standards of her invisible friend "Mrs. Harris." In the case of the last
named chimera, it will be recalled that the awful moment came when Mrs.
Gamp's boon companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough to declare
her belief that no such person as "Mrs. Harris" was, or ever had been,
in existence. So the awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grundy,
too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage to say that no such
being as Mrs. Grundy has ever really existed, or that, even if she has,
she shall exist no more. _What will Mrs. Grundy say?_ Who cares
nowadays--and so long as nobody cares, the good lady is as dead as need
be.
Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear of his neighbour, the
creation of timid souls who are afraid of being themselves, and who,
instead of living their lives after their own fashion and desires,
choose to live them in hypocritical discomfort according to the
standards of others, standards which in their turn may be held
insincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so on without end--a
vicious circle of insincere living being thus created, in which no man
is or does anything real, or as he himself would naturally prefer to be
and to do. It is evident that such a state of mutual intimidation can
exist only in small communities, economically interdependent, and among
people with narrow boundaries and no horizons. If you live in a village,
for example, and are dependent on the good opinion of your neighbours
for your means of existence, your morals and your religious belief must
be those of the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only the
rich man in a village who can do as he pleases. The only thing for the
dependent individualist in a village to do is to go somewhere else, to
some place where a man may at the same time hold his job and his
opinions, a place too big to keep track of its units, too busy to ask
irrelevant questions, and so diverse in its constituents as to have
generated tolerance and free operation for all.
Now, in spite of its bigness, the world was till quite recently little
more than a village, curiously held in subjection by village
superstitions and village ethics, narrow conceptions of life and
conduct; but the last twenty years have seen a remarkable enlargement of
the human spirit, a reassertion of the natural rights of man as against
the figments of prurient and emasculate conventions, to which there is
no parallel since the Renaissance. Voices have been heard and truths
told, and multitudes have listened gladly that aforetime must take
shelter either in overawed silence or in utterance so private that they
exerted no influence; and the literature of the day alone, literature of
wide and greedy acceptance, is sufficient warrant for the obituary
announcement which, if not yet, as I said, officially made, is already
writing in the hearts, and even in the actions, of society. The
popularity of such writers as Meredith and Hardy, Ibsen and Nietzsche,
Maeterlinck and Walt Whitman, constitutes a writing on the wall the
significance of which cannot be gainsaid. The vogue alone of Mr. Bernard
Shaw, apostle to the Philistines, is a portent sufficiently conclusive.
To regard Mr. Shaw either as a great dramatist or an original
philosopher is, of course, absurd. He, of all men, must surely be the
last to imagine such a vain thing about himself; but even should he be
so self-deluded, his immense coarse usefulness to his day and generation
remains, and the value of it can hardly be overestimated. What others
have said for years as in a glass darkly, with noble seriousness of
utterance, he proclaims again through his brazen megaphone, with all the
imperturbable _aplomb_ of an impudent showman, having as little
self-respect as he has respect for his public; and, as a consequence,
that vast herd of middle-class minds to whom finer spirits appeal in
vain hear for the first time truths as old as philosophy, and answer to
them with assenting instincts as old as humanity. Truth, like many
another excellent commodity, needs a vulgar advertisement, if it is
to become operative in the masses. Mr. Shaw is truth's vulgar
advertisement. He is a brilliant, carrying noise on behalf of freedom of
thought; and his special equipment for his peculiar revivalist mission
comes of his gift for revealing to the common mind not merely the
untruth of hypocrisy, but the laughableness of hypocrisy, first of all.
He takes some popular convention, that of medicine or marriage or what
you will, and shows you not merely how false it is but how ludicrously
false. He purges the soul, not with the terror and pity of tragedy, but
with the irresistible laughter of rough-and-tumble farce. To think
wrongly is, first of all, so absurd. He proves it by putting wrong
thinking on the stage, where you see it for yourself in action, and
laugh immoderately. Perhaps you had never thought how droll wrong
thinking or no thinking was before; and while you laugh with Shaw
at your side-splitting discovery, the serious message glides in
unostentatiously--wrong thinking is not merely laughable; it is also
dangerous, and very uncomfortable. And so the showman has done his work,
the advertiser has sold his goods, and there is so much more truth in
circulation in unfamiliar areas of society.
That word "society" naturally claims some attention at the hands of one
who would speak of Mrs. Grundy, particularly as she has owed her long
existence to a general misconception as to what constitutes "society,"
and to a superstitious terror as to its powers over the individual.
Society--using the word in its broad sense--has heretofore been regarded
as a vague tremendous entity imposing a uniformity of opinion and action
on the individual, under penalty of a like vague tremendous disapproval
for insubordination. Independent minds, however, have from time to time,
and in ever increasing numbers, ventured to do their own will and
pleasure in disregard of this vague tremendous disapproval, and have,
strange to say, found no sign of the terrible consequences threatened
them, with the result that they, and the onlookers, have come to the
conclusion that this fear of society is just one more bugaboo of
timorous minds, with no power over the courageous spirit. From a
multitude of such observations men and women have come more and more to
draw the conclusion that the solidarity of society is nothing but a
myth, and that so-called society is merely a loosely connected series of
independent societies, formed by natural selection among their members,
each with its own codes and satisfactions; and that a man not welcome in
one society may readily find a home for himself in another, or indeed,
if necessary, and if he be strong enough, rest content with his own
society of one.
There was a time when a doubt as to the credibility of the book of
Genesis or a belief in the book of Darwin made the heretic a lonely man,
but nowadays he is hardly likely to go without friends. Besides, men and
women of strong personal character are not usually indiscriminately
gregarious. On the contrary, they are apt to welcome any disparity
between them and their neighbours which tends to safeguard their leisure
and protect them against the social inroads of irrelevant persons. I
recall the case of a famous novelist, who, himself jealous of his own
proper seclusion, permitted the amenities of his neighbours to pleasure
his wife who was more sociably inclined, and smilingly allowed himself
to be sacrificed once a week on the altar of a domestic "at home" day.
It was amusing to see him in his drawing-room on Fridays, surrounded by
every possible form of human irrelevancy--men and women well enough in
their way, of course, but absolutely unrelated, if not antipathetic to
him and all he stood for--heroically doing his best to seem really "at
home." But there came a time when he published a book of decidedly
"dangerous" tendencies, if not worse, and then it was a delight to see
how those various nobodies fled his contact as they would the plague.
His drawing-room suddenly became a desert, and when you dropped in on
Fridays you found there--only the people he wanted. "Is not this," he
would laughingly say, "a triumph of natural selection? See how simply,
by one honest action, I have cut off the bores!"
To cut off the bores! Yes, that is the desperate attempt that any man or
woman who would live their own lives rather than the lives of others is
constantly engaged in making; and more and more all men and women are
realizing that there is only one society that really counts, the society
of people we want, rather than the people who want us or don't want us
or whom we don't want. And nowadays the man or woman must be
uncomfortable or undesirable, indeed, who cannot find all the society he
or she can profitably or conveniently handle, be their opinions and
actions never so anti-Grundy. Thus the one great fear that more than any
other has kept Mrs. Grundy alive, the fear of being alone in the world,
cut off from such intercourse with our fellows as most of us feel the
need of at times, has been put an end to by the ever increasing
subdivision of "society" into friendly seclusions and self-dependent
communities of men and women with like ways and points of view, however
disapproved in alien circles. What "shocks" one circle will seem
perfectly natural in another; and one great truth should always be held
firmly in mind--that the approval of one's neighbours has never yet paid
a man's bills. So long as he can go on paying those, and retain the
regard of the only society he values--that of himself and a few
friends--he can tell Mrs. Grundy to go--where she belongs. And this
happily is--almost--as true nowadays for woman as for man; which is the
main consideration, for, it need hardly be said, that it has been on her
own sex that the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy has weighed peculiarly hard.
Had that tyranny been based on a genuine moral ideal, one would have
some respect for it, but, as the world has always known, it has been
nothing of the sort. On the contrary, it has all along been an organized
hypocrisy which condoned all it professed to censure on condition that
it was done in unhealthy secrecy, behind the closed doors of a lying
"respectability." All manner of uncleanness had been sanctioned so long
as it wore a mask of "propriety," whereas essentially clean and
wholesome expressions of human nature, undisguised manifestations of the
joy and romance of life, have been suppressed and confounded with their
base counterfeits merely because they have sought the sunlight of
sincerity rather than the shade where evil does well to hide. Man's
proper delight in the senses, the natural joy of men and women in each
other, the love of beauty, naked and unashamed, the romantic emotions,
and all that passionate vitality that dreams and builds and glorifies
the human story: all this, forsooth, it has been deemed wrong even to
speak of, save in colourless euphemisms, and their various drama has had
to be carried on by evasion and subterfuge pitiably silly indeed in this
robustly procreative world. Silly, but how preposterous, too, and no
longer to be endured.
It was a gain indeed to drag these vital human interests into the arena
of undaunted discussion, but things are clearly seen to have already
passed beyond that stage. Discussion has already set free in the world
braver and truer ideals, ideals no longer afraid of life, but, in the
courage of their joyousness, feasibly close to all its breathing facts.
Men and women refuse any longer to allow their most vital instincts to
be branded with obloquy, and the fulness of their lives to be thwarted
at the bidding of an impure and irrational fiction of propriety. On
every hand we find the right to happiness asserted in deeds as well as
words. The essential purity of actions and relations to which a merely
technical or superstitious irregularity attaches is being more and more
acknowledged, and the fanciful barriers to human happiness are
everywhere giving way before the daylight of common sense. Love and
youth and pleasure are asserting their sacred natural rights, rights as
elemental as those forces of the universe by which the stars are
preserved from wrong, and the merely legal and ecclesiastical fictions
which have so long overawed them are fleeing like phantoms at cockcrow.
It is no longer sinful to be happy--even in one's own way; and the
extravagances of passion, the ebullitions of youth, and the vagaries of
pleasure are no longer frowned down by a sour-visaged public opinion,
but encouraged, or, if necessary, condoned, as the dramatic play of
natural forces, and as welcome additions to the gaiety of nations. The
true sins against humanity are, on the other hand, being exposed and
pilloried with a scientific eye for their essential qualities.
... The cold heart, and the murderous tongue,
The wintry soul that hates to hear a song,
The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye,
And all the little poisoned ways of wrong.
Man's virtues and vices are being subjected to a re-classification, in
the course of which they are entertainingly seen, in no few instances,
to be changing places. The standards of punishment applied by Dante to
his inferno of lost souls is being, every year, more closely
approximated; warm-blooded sins of instinct and impulse, as having
usually some "relish of salvation" in them, are being judged lightly,
when they are accounted sins at all, and the cold-hearted sins of
essential selfishness, the sins of cruelty and calculation and
cowardice, are being nailed up as the real crimes against God and man.
The individual is being allowed more and more to be the judge of his own
actions, and all actions are being estimated more in regard to their
special relation and environment, as the relativity of right and wrong,
that most just of modern conceptions, is becoming understood. The hidden
sins of the pious and respectable are coming disastrously into the
light, and it no longer avails for a man to be a pillar of orthodoxy on
Sundays if he be a pillar of oppression all the rest of the week; while
the negative virtues of abstinence from the common human pleasures go
for less than nothing in a world that no longer regards the theatre, the
race course, and the card table, or even a beautiful woman, as under the
especial wrath of God. No, the Grundy "virtues" are fast disappearing,
and piano legs are once more being worn in their natural nudity. The
general trend is unmistakable and irresistible, and such apparent
contradictions of it as occasionally get into the newspapers are of no
general significance; as when, for example, some exquisitely refined
Irish police officer suppresses a play of genius, or blushingly covers
up the nakedness of a beautiful statue, or comes out strong on the
question of woman's bathing dress when some sensible girl has the
courage to go into the water with somewhat less than her entire walking
costume; or, again, when some crank invokes the blue laws against Sunday
golf or tennis; or some spinster association puts itself on record
against woman's smoking: all these are merely provincial or parochial
exceptions to the onward movement of morals and manners, mere spasmodic
twitchings, so to say, of the poor old lady on her deathbed. We know
well enough that she who would so sternly set her face against the
feminine cigarette would have no objection to one of her votaries
carrying on an affair with another woman's husband--not the least in the
world, so long as she was careful to keep it out of the courts. And such
is a sample of her morality in all her dealings. Humanity will lose no
real sanctity or safeguard by her demise; only false shame and false
morality will go--but true modesty, "the modesty of nature," true
propriety, true religion--and incidentally true love and true
marriage--will all be immeasurably the gainers by the death of this
hypocritical, nasty-minded old lady.
V